The article examines writer Ralph Waldo Emerson's notions of dreams. From his early years of Transcendentalism in the 1830s to the waning years of his active intellectual life in the 1870s, Emerson privately and publicly speculated on the strange wisdom of dreams. In the development of his natural history of intellect, Emerson reflects uneasily on the apparently daemonic nature of dreams. In his lecture Demonology, Emerson confesses his trepidation before dreams. Emerson struggles to put dreams intellectually and morally underfoot by explaining their source and nature and distilling their energy for a practical, ethical purpose. He insists that dreams have a certain nature and reason, in that they illustrate the unplumbed structure of the intellect and its double-consciousness. Dreams for Emerson pertain to a mysterious structural force of the self, what he at times refers to as the unconscious mind. While Emerson insists that evolutionary law presides over the dreaming unconscious, whose end is the idealized intellect, Demonology suggests that his faith in order may not be purely affirmative in its origin.
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